Prepare a tasty lunch for all ages and eat it outdoors together while the days are sunny and warm. In this menu, melted cheese sandwiches cut into wedges and semi-homemade tomato soup with chunks of ripe tomatoes from the garden taste fresh and satisfying.

Serve watermelon slices, strawberries and other summer fruits for dessert.

A cupcake or sea-salt-topped brownie makes the meal extra special if there’s a birthday in the house or if you crave something so deliciously sweet.

Here are the recipes for the simple soup and sandwich, “comfort foods” you can prepare in minutes with your pint-size chefs.

Donna Erickson’s award-winning series “Donna’s Day” is airing on public television nationwide. To find more of her creative family recipes and activities, visit donnasday.com and link to the Donna’s Day Facebook fan page. Her latest book is “Donna Erickson’s Fabulous Funstuff for Families.”

As you comment, please be respectful of other commenters and other viewpoints. Our goal with article comments is to provide a space for civil, informative and constructive conversations. We reserve the right to remove any comment we deem to be defamatory, rude, insulting to others, hateful, off-topic or reckless to the community. See our full terms of use here.

More in Opinion

My parents ask me to give up on Betsy. My wife tells me to put her to pasture. My kids are too young to care, but I suspect they’re beginning to recognize her as part of the family, as I have these past 15 years and counting. A sheen of gorgeous rust creeps across her doors. Her front hubcaps are...

KASS HAD IT BACKWARDS John Kass’s Sept. 17 column, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a Christian,” has it backwards. The American religious and political right are attempting to enforce fundamentalist beliefs, unconstitutionally, on all Americans. “Religious tests” cut both ways. No “established church” is simple. Very few Republican nominees aren’t “pro-life.” Full-page church ads tell correct ways...

HOW IS IT THAT … So, how is it that we can create the incredible Cassini spacecraft, have it travel flawlessly for 20 years at speeds up to 70,000 miles per hour, meticulously capturing and transmitting endless photos and data while darting around Saturn and its moons for 13 years and yet we cannot get a manhole cover flush with...

Two women in a car that had seen better days approached me on my walk the other Saturday and asked me what town they were in. I have previously noted that it is uncanny how many times I am asked for directions, which suggests to me that I must have about me an aura of charity and friendliness. That looks like a...

I recently testified in support of a proposal to restrict menthol tobacco sales to adult-only stores in Minneapolis. St. Paul is now considering a similar proposal, and other cities are sure to follow. When communities look to restrict menthol, one objection always comes up. The objection is, “Menthols are the cigarettes of Black people, so this proposal is racist.” You...

I was 2½ years old when Huracán Santa Clara hit Puerto Rico on a late summer August day in 1956. I don’t remember it at all. My late mother, who was 30 at the time, spoke about it throughout the years in awed terms — roofs torn off, wooden homes left in ruins, mudslides, flooded streets. “Dios mio (My God). It...